Commercial, gas-fired tunnel ovens equipped with conveyors produce, among other things, pizzas, cookies, bread, cakes and donuts. Each oven routinely processes a large volume of food products and, as a result, becomes rather dirty. Bits of the food products themselves, burned food products, and soot from the burners are typical sources of contamination that accumulate during use.
Gas-fired tunnel ovens traditionally have been cleaned manually with detergent and acid solutions. The oven must be taken apart for cleaning by these methods. In addition to the oven walls, roof, and floor, the conveyor used with the tunnel oven must be cleaned, as well as any jet-impingement convection fingers, convection blowers, and fired burners. Cleaning by the traditional methods is tedious and expensive.